Category: US politics

Noah Rothman:

It took a while, but the press has settled on a narrative in its quest to put a period on the monthslong debt-ceiling saga: Joe Biden won!

“President Biden this week accomplished what America elected him to do — govern from the center and make deals that solve problems,” the Washington Post’s David Ignatius opined, citing the progressive Left’s hostility toward the debt-ceiling deal the Biden White House hashed out with Speaker Kevin McCarthy as proof for his thesis.

The New York Times also deemed the deal a “win,” and praised the president’s magnanimity. By allowing McCarthy to “claim the win,” Times analyst Peter Baker wrote, Biden secured his Republican interlocutor’s “hard right” flank, warding off a threat to the speakership even as he absorbed blows from progressives.’

Having talked and cajoled Republicans out of their monomaniacal desire to destroy the American economy in pursuit of their own parochial political advantage, Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast declared, the “often underestimated” president emerged as “the big winner” in the standoff.

“Getting lawmakers to collectively step back from the financial cliff was as big a victory as any specific provision from the debt ceiling package,” Politico marveled. “And it would serve as a blueprint for the reelection campaign to come.” The deal is “a win for Biden on many levels,” USA Today’s reporters gushed. Biden achieved “total victory” and delivered a “remarkably one-sided win on the debt limit this week,” Washington Post opinion columnist Matt Bai wrote. Biden’s achievement outstripped “my wildest expectation of what he could possibly achieve in this negotiation,” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said. And so on.

It is a struggle to square these buoyant assessments of Biden’s transactional acumen with both the terms of the deal to which he consented and the implosion of the strategy the president pursued in the seven months it took to get there.

The president’s approach to the debt-ceiling standoff came into view even before the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats had already resigned themselves to losing control of one or both chambers of Congress. “Republicans are determined to hold the economy hostage,” Biden said at a gathering of the Democratic National Committee in October 2022. He forecast an effort by Republicans to force the White House into consenting to reforms to America’s major entitlement programs or using the threat of default as leverage.

Biden brushed off calls from both Democratic lawmakers and members of his own administration to seek a legislative abolition of the debt ceiling altogether in the lame-duck session of Congress. Instead, administration officials insisted, the debt-ceiling debate would establish a politically beneficial contrast between his White House and the GOP. As one Biden adviser confessed, “the gun is in Republicans’ hands” and “there is little question as to who will get blamed” for a default.

This bravado masked a structural problem for Democrats, however, insofar as it was clear that there was no appetite among moderate Senate Democrats for pushing through a short-term debt-ceiling hike via reconciliation. So the matter would have to wait until 2023, and the Biden White House would count on the fractious House Republican conference to self-destruct when the chips were down.

By the time the 118th Congress was sworn in, Biden settled on his offer to the party in control of the chamber from which appropriations bills must originate: nothing at all. The president would deign to discuss only budgetary issues with House Republicans, but not the debt ceiling. “There should not be conditions around this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted. “We should not be negotiating.” This strategy was endorsed by Democratic boosters in the media who convinced themselves that the GOP had rolled Barack Obama during debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011 (a conclusion with which no Republican agrees). But it was bad advice: The Biden White House refused to engage in substantive talks with Republicans well past the point at which its obstinacy became self-defeating.

“If the president doesn’t act,” Speaker McCarthy warned in late March, Republicans would force his hand. The House GOP would pass its own debt-ceiling hike on its terms, which would compel Democrats to respond. McCarthy gambled on his conference’s capacity to rally together around a deal, and the bet paid off. Still, Biden was unmoved by the debt-ceiling bill the GOP produced. He refused to budge, even as a growing number of prominent Senate and House Democrats urged him to abandon his recalcitrance and agree to negotiations.

Eventually, Biden buckled under pressure — not just from his own party but the voting public. By the end of May, poll after poll found that the public sided with the GOP’s position — that increasing the nation’s borrowing limit should be paired with spending cuts — while self-described Democrats were split on whether to endorse the Democratic Party’s pursuit of a no-strings debt-ceiling hike.

The deal to which Biden acquiesced reflects the leverage Democrats sacrificed during the months in which they committed themselves to mulishness. The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael R. Strain summarizes the details of the deal neatly:

$1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, tougher work requirements on certain safety-net programs, clawing back unspent Covid-relief money, measures to speed up environmental reviews for major projects, and no tax increases. Considering that Democrats control the Senate and the White House, this is all the more impressive.

Throughout it all, Democratic partisans toyed with ex machinas and elaborate Rube Goldberg devices purportedly designed to bypass the constitutional impediments to Joe Biden’s desired outcome. From repurposing the 14th Amendment so that it somehow authorized new debt rather than simply mandating the repayment of existing debt to just ignoring the debt ceiling altogether, Democrats considered all manner of non-options out of a desire to avoid facing the music. But in the end, Joe Biden caved.

In evaluating the fan fiction circulating this week about Biden’s supposed victory, the operative word is “fan.” These journalistic outlets are sacrificing their credibility by disregarding reality and substituting instead a preferred narrative of events in which Joe Biden emerges the hero. Indeed, the president has presided over a bipartisan achievement here, but he had to be dragged into it by House Republicans and the reality-based members of his own party.

The Biden White House is politically obligated to declare victory amid retreat, and it is best practice to retail that dubious narrative to reporters. But there’s no immutable law of the universe that compels reporters to accept the narrative at face value. That is a choice — a deeply regrettable one.

 

Jim Geraghty:

This is an actual Truth Social post from former president Donald Trump yesterday:

Have you heard that “Rob” DeSanctimonious wants to change his name, again. He is demanding that people call him DeeeSantis, rather than DaSantis. Actually, I like “Da” better, a nicer flow, so I am happy he is changing it. He gets very upset when people, including reporters, don’t pronounce it correctly. Therefore, he shouldn’t mind, DeSanctimonious?

These are apparently the sorts of thoughts that consume the mind of one of the four people most likely to take the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025. (The other three are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Ron DeSantis. While some other figure could surprise us all by leaping to the Democratic or Republican presidential nomination, or even by mounting a competitive independent bid, right now, all other figures are extreme underdogs.)

By the way, the next evidence that DeSantis “gets very upset when people, including reporters, don’t pronounce it correctly,” will be the first evidence.

Trump, however, is not alone in spending time and energy contemplating the proper pronunciation of “DeSantis.” The New York Times ran a two-byline column, “Deh-Santis or Dee-Santis? Even He Has Been Inconsistent,” although they at least acknowledged that it is a “highly inconsequential matter.” Axios also believed that this topic was worth spending time, energy, reader attention, and some of humanity’s presumably finite supply of neurons on. (In Mike Allen’s newsletter today, the “How do you pronounce DeSantis’s name” section is above the section about the House passing the debt-ceiling deal. Smart brevity! All the news you need, if you have the attention span of an over-caffeinated ferret.)

J.D. Tuccille:

For all of the posturing over the debt ceiling, it’s easy to forget that a statutory limit to federal borrowing isn’t the real issue; the real problem is that the federal government habitually spends more money than it brings in. The fact that the feds are currently collecting less tax revenue than anticipated demonstrates that spending is the one component that government officials can, but rarely attempt to, control. Raising the debt ceiling, again, just kicks the can down the road towards disaster. The real trick is to cut expenditures, which politicians hate to do because largesse from Uncle Sugar is an effective way to court constituents and buy votes.

“The debt limit—commonly called the debt ceiling—is the maximum amount of debt that the Department of the Treasury can issue to the public or to other federal agencies,” the Congressional Budget Office helpfully explains. “The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the debt limit remains unchanged, there is a significant risk that at some point in the first two weeks of June, the government will no longer be able to pay all of its obligations…. If the debt limit is not raised or suspended before the Treasury’s cash and extraordinary measures are exhausted, the government will have to delay making payments for some activities, default on its debt obligations, or both.” …

“The deadline to raise the nation’s debt ceiling is closer than previously thought because tax receipts in April fell below projections,” the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model noted this month. “PWBM estimates that receipts are running $150 billion below government projections for fiscal year 2023, most likely due to a decline in capital gains income and weakening corporate profit margins.”

Government officials can’t make the American people be more prosperous than economic conditions allow (though the state is good at worsening those conditions so that jobs and profits evaporate). Even if individuals and businesses are scrupulously honest about reporting income and paying taxes (and there’s always a gap when people think government claims too much), that means there are no guarantees when it comes to collecting revenue. To balance the books, politicians can hope the tax system will yield more, but they only control spending. And they will do almost anything to avoid cutting spending.

People aren’t blind to politicians’ failings. “Gallup finds between 34% and 38% of U.S. adults expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in President Joe Biden, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and congressional leaders in both major parties to do or recommend the right thing for the economy,” the polling firm announced May 9.

Fortunately, there are some online tools that let Americans try their hand at making the tough spending (and tax) decisions the political class would like to ignore.

First up is The Washington Post‘s budget game. As these online tools go, it’s a blunt instrument that allows little choice for guiding tax-and-spending policy over the next decade. While I was able to substantially cut the projected debt, every possible set of permitted choices leaves tens of trillions of dollars in red ink in 2033. The Post‘s preferred message seems to be that balancing the books is too hard, so we need to raise the debt ceiling.

Federal Balancing Act 2023, from the Bipartisan Policy Center, allows a lot more room for detailed choices by users. You can control spending across Education, Health Care, Defense, and other sectors, and raise or lower taxes on corporations, individuals of different income levels, gasoline, and the like.

By slashing military spending, getting the federal government out of education, raising the retirement age, and eliminating whole areas of spending, I was able to run a budget surplus starting in 2023 and move the federal government 163.2 percent of the way towards a sustainable budget.

Hmmm. Looks like I have some room for tax cuts.

The Debt Fixer tool from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also encourages users to “make the hard budget choices to stabilize debt at 98% of the economy by 2033 by identifying $8.1 trillion of deficit reduction and bring it down to 60% by 2050.” You can even save your choices as a PDF to revisit the issue later.

Again, by focusing on cuts and reducing or eliminating areas of federal activity, I reduced debt as a percentage of GDP to 83 percent by 2033 and 30 percent by 2050.

All of these tools are imperfect. They limit options in ways that can be frustrating—it would be handy to be able to gut certain agencies, or even whole departments. They also make assumptions about costs and benefits that are at best arguable.

More arguable, though, are assertions by officials that spending must increase forever without regard for the ability to pay, and that debt must necessarily climb as a result. Worse is the fantasy that the debt limit can be ignored—a ridiculous idea with which the Biden administration is flirting. The federal government must learn to spend no more than it collects, or it will cause massive problems.

“This year, our budget deficit will likely be $1.4 trillion. What’s more, the deficit will reach about $2.8 trillion in 2033. And that’s assuming peace, prosperity, relatively low interest rates, no new spending, and that some provisions of the 2017 tax cuts will expire as scheduled,” the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy wrote this month in Reason. “That’s $20 trillion in new borrowing over 10 years. So far, Uncle Sam has ‘only’ accumulated $31 trillion in debt over the course of our entire history. But it gets worse fast.”

“Waiting to put fiscal policy on a sustainable course and allowing federal debt to continue to climb would have several effects on the economy,” the Congressional Budget Office cautioned last year. “The high and rising federal debt that CBO projects over the next three decades would have serious consequences for the economy and federal budget, including the crowding out of private investment, higher interest costs, and increased risks of a fiscal crisis and of other disruptions.”

Arguments among the political class over raising the debt ceiling gloss over the indisputable fact that growing federal debt is evidence of officials’ failures to make difficult choices about the limits to government largesse. And the situation is likely to worsen as damage accumulates. Anemic tax receipts (because that’s what government types care about) will become a regular feature as poorer Americans struggle to make ends meet in a hobbled economy.

These independent budget tools, despite flaws, offer important insights into what the federal government does with our money. Politicians may not be up to the job, but somebody needs to take on the tough (or not so tough) choices that have to be made to bring federal finances under control.

Andrew Sullivan:

“I am drunk on Schadenfreude … There is nothing better, not in this world or the next.” Those were not the words of Donald J Trump on Wednesday night, reviewing the shambles of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch on Twitter. They were Jonathan V Last’s — of the “Never Trump” site, The Bulwark.

He wasn’t alone. The MSM chorus dedicated to obliterating the only currently viable alternative to Trump as the GOP nominee was close to deafening. “DeSantis’s Big Moment Goes Awry With a Twitter Meltdown,” crowed the NYT. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser exulted that DeSantis was “an out-of-his-depth forty-four-year-old who was going to get eaten alive.” Bulwark mucky-muck Charlie Sykes mused, “Surely there have been worse clusterfucked campaign launches than the one we saw last night, but so far, no one can remember any of them.”

Sykes also called DeSantis “Meatball” (a Trump insult) and “Florida Beta Man.” Bill Kristol wryly noted how the name DeSantis could generate lots of puns along the lines of “DeSaster,” or “DeBacle.” He also praised Trump as the “Alpha” of the primary race. JVL referred to Ron’s “Tiny-D Energy.” The Lincoln Project summed up the mood by directly speaking to DeSantis: “We’re sure going to love watching you crash and burn.”

And, to be fair, they weren’t wrong on the launch. Using Twitter for it was bizarre — horrid visuals, useless optics, on a platform loved by very online elites but alien to the vast majority of normie Americans DeSantis needs to reach. And although I once had some small hopes for Elon Musk’s Twitter, I sure don’t now. His platform is a shit-show, in all meanings of that word, and so was the DeSantis event. A shrewd pol would have kept Musk far away. Yet DeSantis effectively made his own announcement a hostage to the tech tyrant’s amour propre. Sad!

And if DeSantis wants to be the anti-woke candidate, he has to do better than telling us that DEI and SEL and ESG are just as bad as CRT. That’s an insane amount of insidery jargon. He has to do more than simply repeating the word “woke.” He has to appeal beyond the GOP base to the moderates and independents who still believe in individual freedom, merit, colorblind racial policy, personal responsibility and letting kids grow up shielded from progressive fanatics.

DeSantis has to engage the majority who are fine with trans adults but don’t believe young children can consent to sex changes and who think sports are sex-segregated for a good reason; those who support non-discrimination laws but don’t believe in hiring people because of their race and sex; those who want their kids taught the basics of math and reading — not that America is a white supremacist country and must be dismantled; those who oppose police abuse but not the police themselves; those who supported a short-term lockdown but not open-ended social death.

And DeSantis has to remind people, as Peggy Noonan puts it today, that “his calling card [is] that in a time of true national crisis — a historic pandemic, the sharp rise of woke ideology — he provided strong leadership under which his state thrived.”

Is DeSantis capable of this? Judging from Wednesday night, no. Perhaps this was because he’s in a primary campaign and thinks a narrow, online, wingnut focus is the safest bet. But key to his primary bid is his ability to convince Republican voters that he can reach beyond the Trump base in ways that Trump cannot. So far: not happening.

Does that mean his campaign is over before it’s begun? I don’t know, but I doubt it. There’s a long way to go. He has raised a lot of money. He retains a couple of strong cards: against Trump, he’s fresh, and against Biden, he’s young. Those advantages will continue to matter. He has a strong record in Florida — on Covid (not as brutal a shutdown), the economy (two percent unemployment), immigration (mandatory E-Verify!) and the fight against successor ideology. He built a 20-point majority in his state, which has to count for something. And I find myself rooting for him against Trump not out of any affection or much admiration, but simply because I believe Biden is a lot weaker than many Democrats seem to think, and because my primary goal is preventing a second Trump term. I fear that Biden is fast becoming the Yuri Andropov of the Democratic Party — and can’t actually beat Trump next time.

I also believe that the rapid corrosion of the core beliefs that sustain liberal democracy is the deepest underlying crisis we face. Wokeness is incompatible with a free society as we know it; it is in fact designed to destroy it, and replace it with identity-based collectivism. Biden will accelerate this, we now know. And Trump’s record in ensuring the cultural dominance and legitimacy of the far left is clear.

So why are so many center-right Never Trumpers celebrating what appears to be a major positive development for Trump? David Frum finally felt the need to explain why he and others are so keen to clear the way for Trump’s return:

What kind of alternative would DeSantis be? We did not want Trump’s abuse of power for selfish advantage replicated by a president who differed from Trump only by arriving at the office on time instead of watching television until 11 a.m.

Seriously? Trump attempted a coup; he committed obstruction of justice; he was impeached twice; he abused the separation of powers; he has vowed to pardon criminals who support him; he is utterly irrational; he lies with staggering abandon; he vows to execute drug dealers without a trial; he supports war crimes; he has enriched himself at the public trough. DeSantis has done and said nothing like any of this; he has governed aggressively within the bounds of his constitutional limits but he is not a sociopath and not a wannabe dictator-for-life. The notion that there is no difference between him and Trump except punctuality makes a mockery of everything Frum has written about Trump in the past.

He continues: “We did not want more strenuous disdain for allies — Ukraine today, who knows who else tomorrow?” Did I miss DeSantis’ vowing to get rid of NATO, like Trump? And what does “disdain for allies” mean? Yes, DeSantis is not a neoconservative in the Frum mode. But who on earth is anymore? And compared to Kim Jong Un’s pen-pal who has vowed to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, and who personally trashed almost every democratic leader in the West? Please. Frum again:

We did not want a more systematic and shrewd exploitation of tensions in American society, more deft manipulation of resentments along lines of race, faith, sex, region, and educational attainment.

How, I wonder, would David describe the imposition of critical race, queer and gender theory in public high school curricula? The enforcement of systemic race and sex discrimination across the entire federal government and much of corporate America? The creation of sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants? The introduction of sex changes for children before puberty — and mandatory pronoun choice in pre-K? Or the enabling of mass fraudulent migration? These culture war initiatives are apparently not “deft manipulation of resentments.” But opposing them is. Heads the far left wins. Tails the right loses.

David French tries to make a similar argument for rejecting DeSantis:

I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.

How Frum puts it: “Never Trump Republicans want a free trade, free market economics conservative.” But unless Ronald Reagan returns from the dead, or we magically get transported back to 1987, this isn’t anything close to a realistic option. French — someone who knows much better — even equates a state legislature setting public school curricula with a violation of free speech — and ignores every free speech challenge from the left. Then there is the specious argument that since DeSantis is not beating Trump right now, he cannot beat Trump ever. But that’s absurdly premature — a piece of rationalization, not analysis.

With Frum and French and many alleged Never Trumpers, it seems, they’d rather risk a second Trump term than compromise an iota of their defunct neocon vision of what conservatism should be. That has zero practical relevance for today’s Republican Party, and suggests they’ve learned absolutely nothing from how Trump came to dominate the American right, and how best to counter him. Putting up another Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio isn’t going to cut it. Which is to say: I love both Davids, but, on this topic, they are not serious people.

And so Trump’s chances of returning just increased dramatically this week. And the “resistance” is near drunk with joy. Tells you something, no? And nothing hopeful.

Judson Berger:

The news doesn’t quit, of course. Why, since early last week, Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan was arrested and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro had his home raided by police, all while Peru juggles the extradition of former president Alejandro Toledo and the detention of more-recent former president Pedro Castillo.

And . . . if none of these events created so much as a blip in the continental United States, that’s probably because these scandals are no more extraordinary than our own. Gone are the days when, say, the arrest or exile of a former Pakistani leader (more or less protocol on that slice of the subcontinent) might have aroused some morbid curiosity in foreign dysfunction. Developing-nation political chaos is starting to look uncomfortably familiar to the American voter.

Okay, it’s not quite so bad as Pakistan. But Jim Geraghty, surveying the 2024 landscape, describes a sorry sight:

We have one guy who is the likely nominee on the Republican side who is fundamentally and indisputably unfit for public office, and who a majority of Americans thinks should be charged with crimes, including trying to steal an election.

We have another guy who is definitely the nominee for the other party who a majority of Americans thinks does not have all the marbles to be president anymore.

Concerns about President Biden’s fitness extend well beyond his dotage. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee this week released evidence about Biden family dealings that are alarming, and cannot be easily explained away. From NR’s news report:

The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system GOP lawmakers say was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.

Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.

Expect this story to snowball. Also hanging over the Biden presidency is Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss’s investigation involving Hunter Biden. Andrew McCarthy writes that President Biden, by publicly declaring his son’s innocence, has already interfered in the probe — this, amid whistleblower allegations that the FBI “has supposedly been sitting on evidence that implicates the president in a bribery scheme.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump.

He was impeached twice, you may recall. On Tuesday, he was also found liable for battery and defamation in journalist E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit. Put another way, by NR’s editorial: “For the first time in history, a candidate will seek the presidency having been found civilly liable for sexual abuse.” (And so, we simply must nominate him.)

Add it to Trump’s distinguished pile of legal woes: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s questionable case relating to Stormy Daniels (in which Trump was arrested), the DOJ special-counsel investigation covering classified-document handling and January 6, and another stop-the-steal-ish probe in Georgia. Coinciding with these developments, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago was raided last year, followed by searches of several Biden properties, both in connection with the handling of classified files.

So yeah, Jair Bolsonaro and his problems are boring by comparison — to George Santos alone.

None of this is to say America is trending banana republic, or becoming “third-world,” as Trump repeated at this week’s CNN town hall. Our economy, for one, continues to be an unstoppable and innovative force for good that defies the popular pessimism. But when it comes to our politics, to adapt an admonition: We’re not electing our best.

That includes Wisconsin, which is being governed poorly by a lifelong education bureaucrat, who was chosen by voters the second time (assuming no Milwaukee or Dane county voter fraud) over one of the worst candidates to have won a GOP primary in the state party’s history.

Fox News:

Former Attorney General Bill Barr said Friday that former President Donald Trump’s presidency would be a “horror show” if he were re-elected because his former boss lacks the “discipline” as well as the “ability for strategic thinking” needed to get things done.

“It is a horror show, you know, when… he’s left to his own devices,” Barr said in remarks at the City Club of Cleveland in Ohio on Friday.

“If you believe in his policies, what he’s advertising is his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them,” Barr said to a reporter who asked if Trump is fit to be president again.

The reporter noted that some voters say they want Trump re-elected for his policies and are willing to overlook his mistakes as president in his last term.

“He does not have the discipline,” Barr replied. “He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system.”

“And, and so you may want his policies. But Trump will not deliver Trump policies,” Barr said.

“He will deliver chaos, and if anything lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be.”

According to recent Fox News polling, Trump is the favored candidate for the Republicans in 2024, even ahead of popular Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has yet to announce his candidacy but is widely rumored to be considering a run.

Barr served as attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020. He was also attorney general during the George H. W. Bush administration.

Barr, by the way, opposed Trump’s indictment, so he cannot be dismissed as a NeverTrumper.

What about Trump’s 2020 and 2024 opponent? Erick Erickson:

Joe Biden earned an all-time-low 36% approval rating in a disastrous new poll from ABC. Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the top two Republican primary challengers, both beat Biden by 7 points in individual match-ups according to the survey. To add insult to injury, only 36% of Democrats want to renominate Biden while 58% want someone else at the top of the ticket.

Bad to worse: In a theoretical matchup between Biden and Trump, Biden trails Trump by nine points among independent voters despite beating Trump by 13 points among the same group in 2020. After Biden won the African American vote by 75% in 2020, the same group only supports Biden by 35% today.

Mentally fit: A shocking 69% of independents and 1 in 5 Democrats said Biden lacks the cognitive clarity to be President. Overall, 32% of those surveyed said Biden has the mental sharpness to be President, down from 51% three years ago.